Each year the manufacture and sale of sporting goods leads to a significant number of new product designs and product properties. For a manufacturer it is essential to quickly follow the latest developments on the market and/or to present a number of innovative products himself. Sporting goods in this context are for example shoes, textiles and accessories in a plurality of models, designs, production options, colors, sizes etc. Currently, most of the new products are in a first step digitally designed, modeled and tested using three-dimensional computer-aided design and/or finite element analysis systems (“3D CAD”/“FEA”).
However, in order to bring a new product on the market, a prototype at first has to be manually made from the digital design. This is typically done in factories which may be located at a different place than the development department which is responsible for the product design. Only after shipment and receipt of the real samples are the product designers able to further optimize their digital designs and return them to the factories, in turn. This process is repeated until the samples have the desired functionality, appearance, cost and quality and can then be released for serial production in the factories. As a result, it often takes several weeks to months or even years until a result is reached.
Moreover, the entire development chain is very inflexible. Thus, the manufacturer can only slowly react to short-lived, fashion market trends and demands. The advantage regarding speed gained by the use of CAD/FEA systems for development is at least partly lost by the overall slow production processes on the part of the factories all over the world.
A manufacturing process which addresses this overall problem is schematically shown in FIG. 1. As can be seen, the known process starts with the unwinding of a composite tape on a roll, which is then cut into individual strips on a conveyor belt (step 1). The strips are then picked up by a robot equipped with a gripping device (step 2). A meltable layer of each strip is then activated by heat to provide adhesion (step 3), and the strip is placed onto a two-dimensional or three-dimensional carrier surface (steps 4a and 4b). Processing a plurality of strips in this manner allows for the assembly of a complex product including such strips in a layered manner. While the existing process improves the manufacturing efficiency and flexibility to some extent, the resulting products still have room for further improvements, since the plurality of strips typically have to be further processed in additional—possibly manual—manufacturing steps to achieve the desired product.
Further manufacturing techniques for creating products based on individual pieces of material and corresponding gripping devices are disclosed e.g., in U.S. Pat. No. 8,567,469 B2, US 2014/0134378 A1, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,427,518, 8,371,838 B2, 7,182,118 B2 and US 2005/0061422 A1. However, also these approaches suffer from the drawback that the characteristics of the resulting products are very limited and that the manufacturing of complex products using these approaches requires significant additional, possibly manual, manufacturing steps.
Further background is disclosed in DE 10 2013 221 018 A1, US 2015/0 101 134 A1, US 2014/0237 738 A1 and US 2014/0 239 556 A1.
Taking the background as a basis, it is therefore the object of the present invention to provide improved manufacturing methods and production means that allow to promptly, at least partially automatically, and preferably locally manufacture a plurality of different prototypes, final products or the like from individual pieces of material (also referred to as “patches”) in a particular flexile manner. In this context, it is another object of the invention to allow for quick and particularly flexible design and/or functional changes to the manufactured objects. Increasing the ability to alter designs of sporting goods on a short timeline will provide for more response capability with respect to the demands of the market and/or customer.